


How She Shines

by Framlingem



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-23
Updated: 2011-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-18 13:56:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Framlingem/pseuds/Framlingem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of the girl who learned the choreography of the void.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How She Shines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mjules](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjules/gifts).
  * Inspired by [dTigeas a damhsa dom](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3172) by mjules. 



There are a lot of stories. Always have been. Back on Earth-that-was, there was the story about the girl with magic shoes. She danced herself to death. There was the story about the girls who snuck out at night to dance in an underground ball in an underground castle with underground princes. They danced themselves into unwanted marriages. There was the story about the girl who was loved by a soldier, and didn't love him back, and danced herself away into the heart of the fire, delicate tutu disappearing as the soldier turned into a puddle of shining tin. Those stories are gone now, gone and forgotten.

 

This is the story of the girl who learned the choreography of the void.

 

She was always a dancer. She was born unremarkable, waving little arms and legs which would not follow her commands. She grew frustrated by their disobedience and became uncommonly still instead, watching everything through solemn eyes, not moving. Her parents grew worried, and because they could do such things, took her to a doctor who tickled her feet and pronounced her normal, physically. Perfectly normal reflexes, perfectly normal spinal column, perfectly normal musculature. The doctor never forgot the infant who smiled at him sunnily, as though she knew what he was doing.

 

Soon enough, her limbs did as she commanded, and there was no stopping her. She moved through her parents' home trailing arms which moved like brances in the breeze, twirling until they were sure she'd fall over. As she danced, she sang to herself, tunes they'd never heard before, songs in languages living and dead, nursery rhymes her older brother had read to her and that she liked enough to set to music. Sometimes she danced in silence, and when her brother questioned this, she frowned at him, and proclaimed the obvious: there was music in everything, silly, and couldn't he _hear_ it? He gazed at her, bemused, and declared that he could not, and pulled up a library program to research the human ear.

 

No story stays happy, though, and this one is no exception. The girl was tricked, and fell into a trap. She was taken by monsters, who did wicked things, and the music she heard became crowded out with cacaphanous noise, the songs that surrounded her built to screams. She ran, and forgot how to dance.

 

The noise was endless, until it ended. Her brother, beloved, brave, and baffled, saved her. She never remembered how, exactly, only that his face was a constant note, and then it was very cold, and then – blessedly – silent. She woke up on a ship, and the ship was a capsule of warmth and light in the middle of frozen darkness. Instead of the voices of a whole world pressing in on her, there were six strange ones, and above it all the unwavering tune of her brother, and under it all and around it all, the steady thrum of the ship herself. She knew the name of the ship before anyone ever told it to her, and found it meet: _Serenity_.

 

Sometimes she could tune them out, and she relished the peace even as she dreaded the return of the noise. She startled easily, the girl did, too occupied with the noises nobody else could hear to listen to the noises everyone else could. They made planetfall on the edges of the system, on worlds with manageable numbers, and it wasn't so bad, most times.

 

She liked to watch the pilot in his cockpit. His fingers danced over the controls, and _Serenity_ danced under his touch. She missed dancing. She tried, sometimes, but she never did remember the steps. The pilot knew. He had joy.

 

The captain found her once, one one of the days when she'd drifted up to the cockpit to find it empty. She tried to explain. “ _Serenity_ woke me up and asked me to dance with her, but my feet don’t remember the steps. I can’t hear the music, but I know they’re singing.” She nodded toward the windows. “ _They’re_ dancing.”

 

He danced with her, and she remembered for a while, and it was wonderful. But it drifted away again, though she held her head tightly enough to bruise the tips of her fingers trying to keep it. This is also a story about treasure, you see, and treasure's not easily kept. She'd found it in the cockpit once, and she would find it again. She watched the laughing pilot. He never caught her, until --

 

“How do you know?” she asked him one night.

He started and swore briefly. “Sweetie, you can't sneak up on people like that. You'll give them heart attacks.”

“There are lots of other ways to give someone a heart attack.”

“What? Never mind. How do I know what?”

“Where to go. You don't get lost. I get lost sometimes. They took away my maps, removed all the magnets, and I can't find my way. I don't know the steps.”

“... you mean, how do I navigate?”

She blinked once, slowly. “Yes.”

“Oh. I use the stars. C'mere, I'll show you.”

 

And so she went to where he sat in the brain of the ship, and listened for the mechanic humming to herself in the heart of the ship, and remembered part of what she had forgotten: that the sailors on Earth-that-was knew the stars and their patterns, and that the same thing could be done between the worlds. The pilot showed her the orrery charts showing the relative movements of the worlds, and taught her the names of the constellations, so much clearer from the cockpit than they'd been from the brightly-lit city of her childhood. She surprised him by recognizing them clearly no matter how he rolled the ship. The shapes didn't change, after all, and the worlds all sat on a plane anyway. Her fingers flowed over the controls like water, and she lost herself for a while in the rythm of the current. A river does not stand still, but moves according to the world around it, changing it and being changed. So did the girl.

 

The pilot died. Nobody said this was a happy story. Not all of it. He died quickly, though, died triumphantly, and there is some happiness to be found in mercy.

 

Now, the captain is stranded, alone. He is trapped, covered in mud to his hips, covered in blood. Some of it's his. As he did so many years ago, he lifts his eyes to the sky, searching it for the glint of a ship coming to aid him. There – to the East. She drifts sideways on the wind, slips down, shaking off a slow and lumbering pursuit which cannot hope to catch her. She spins, leaps, and the sun on her hull and the light of her engines blur in the tears of a man who will not be abandoned ever again.

 

She is a star in the sky. See how she shines.


End file.
